


Jim & Bones in Georgia

by Canon_Is_Relative



Series: The Stories We Tell, The Lies We Live [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Family Issues, Georgia, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mostly Gen, Past Relationship(s), Post Star Trek: Into Darkness, Sons, fathers and sons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-13 12:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the attack on Starfleet, McCoy goes home to Georgia to spend time with his daughter and Jim ignores his own rest and recovery instructions to follow him there. </p><p>Jim is grieving. This McCoy knows but he hasn't realized how deeply, or exactly why. McCoy carries a wound that he's never let anyone else see. </p><p>Fathers and sons, failings and families, angst and accusations. These are the stories they can only tell in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Stories We Tell In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ImpishTubist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpishTubist/gifts).



> I never know what to warn for, I'm always afraid of over- or under-doing it. Here goes:  
> Spoilers for STID // Angst over past character death // Language // Mentions of what may come of religion in the future which is not exactly flattering to the institution // Minor liberties with (TOS) canon timeline // "Bowden's Malady" stolen shamelessly from "Firefly" // Only seen STID three times so I might have missed something // Unbeta'd since my beta of choice is the recipient of this gift and I wanted it to be a surprise \0/
> 
> Ok go read now.

“Ho…ly… _shit_! Bones, are you seeing this?”

 

McCoy glanced over to where Jim was gazing out the window, then did a double-take, the groundcar swerving ever so slightly.

 

The moon was as round and full and bright as his childhood recollections, magnified in the lens of memory and nostalgia. Resting just over Lookout Mountain, silvery light seemed to roll off it, edging every tree and house and blade of grass in quicksilver. The whole scene looked too grand and too staged to be real.

 

“It looks like…Jesus…” Jim was grasping for words, now pressing the points of his fingers against the glass.

 

“Like Star Wars?”

 

Jim turned to him, skeptical frown melting into a grin. “That’s no moon…it’s  a space station!”

 

McCoy wanted to laugh but he was wound too tight. The next step after laughing at Jim’s jokes was forgiving him wholesale.

 

“There is _no way_ the moon can be that big.”

 

“Jim,” McCoy had to laugh, then, there was nothing for it but to enjoy the glow of Jim’s misplaced amazement. “You’ve _been to_ the moon. You are rather uniquely qualified to know just how big it is.”

 

Jim shook his head, not taking the bait. “S’not the same.”

 

Bones wrapped his left hand around the wheel and stole one last glance at the moon before returning his focus to the road. Georgia had done kind of a neat thing, a century or so back, thanks to the foresight of an ambitious and popular governor, and started planting trees, everywhere they could. Restoring the native forests where they’d been clear cut during the energy crisis and taking down the shoddy structures of the same time period that were meant to have been temporary but were still standing in many parts of the country, reclaiming those spaces too. Now, around Atlanta, especially, the countryside looked hardly any different from how it did in the antique prints you saw hung in practically any shop in the state. Along with the trees came new regulation on highway and skyway lighting that had restored the view of the stars to the good people who lived beneath them. Raised for most of his life in Iowa where the Riverside shipyards had stolen the stars from the sky well before he dropped out of it as a baby, Jim may have flown among the stars but he had never had a proper way of communing with them. 

 

Bones, watching Jim watch the sky with unabashed awe, began to relax for the first time since that morning, when Jim had invited himself along on his leave to Georgia.

 

=^=

 

It had been mid-afternoon (although he’d swear that only five minutes ago it had been late the previous night, _Jesus_ he needed a drink and a shower) when he’d finally stumbled out of the building he was sharing with five other displaced bureaucrats as a makeshift office (and after the attack last month what wasn’t makeshift in the whole damn city just then? Good God) and into the hot San Francisco sun, the last of the leave assignments processed. With so much mayhem in the wake of Khan’s attack, he’d taken on the full weight of reviewing the Enterprise crew’s phys/psych exams and doling out mandatory leave assignments (some to physical therapy for injuries; some to the advanced grief and trauma center for further examination and treatment; some sent home to families and some assigned to volunteer crews to help work out their feelings of guilt and grief in physical labor to start the rebuilding process around the city; and some, miracle of miracles, simply released for unsupervised leisure time before returning to duty).

 

But as long as the list of assignments was, it wasn’t nearly as long as it should have been. He carried the names of the dead in a silent list held close to his heart. McCoy had thought, after Nero, that the next large-scale tragedy would define him; either he’d break completely or he’d feel nothing. He hadn’t counted on feeling everything, every death and loss and terrifying moment, feeling everything and…carrying on. Still a surgeon, surviving to heal another day. He didn’t know what to make of it, and he hadn’t given himself the time to make anything of it, not while there was still work to be done. But his own leave orders were the first he wrote - home to his daughter and a soft Georgia spring. There’s be time enough there. Time was what he had, what so many of his colleagues and friends had run out of.

 

He rubbed a hand over the growth of stubble on his chin, wishing again for that shower. A glance at the time banished any hope that he could make it in time, and he was grateful for the foresight that had prompted him to bring his duffle with him to the office last night. The shuttle he planned to catch left in half an hour.

 

He cast a longing look back towards his quarters before shaking himself and settling his cover firmly on his head. And as he did so, he felt his shoulders square, his back straighten out as though an invisible string attached to his chest was drawing him up. His uniform, wrinkled and musky as it was, hung lightly on his shoulders. _And when, exactly, did you become a soldier, McCoy?_

 

“Bones!” 

 

That sharp voice, a command to stop, listen, pay attention, like he was the fuckin’ center of the universe. McCoy sighed, shoulders slumping, and stopped to let the sun catch up with him, place him back in his rightful orbit.

 

He tilted his head, looking at him under covertly from under the brim of his cover. Two weeks since Jim had woken from his coma after the transfusion. In McCoy’s book, he should still be in bed. But the captain rarely attended to anything in any book but the one he was writing in his own head. “Jim, I thought you’d be gone by now.” 

 

“Gone, me? Where?”

 

McCoy tapped the PADD he was carrying against Jim’s chest. “Didn’t read your leave orders, didja?”

 

Jim rolled his eyes. “The words ‘leave’ and ‘orders’ just don’t go together in my mind.”

 

“We’ve all got leave,” McCoy explained on autopilot, words he’d been repeating about a hundred times a day, “but not everyone - hardly anyone, in fact - is in any kind of shape to just go skipping off on their own. We’ve lost too many good people over the last year to risk losing any more to bottles or pills or their own hands or God-knows what else—“

 

“Christ, you’re a buzz kill. So where are _you_ going?”

 

“Home,” McCoy said shortly, and started walking again. “I’m on the shuttle in half an hour.”

 

“Home - Georgia?” Jim fell into step beside him.

 

McCoy nodded. “And you’re doing…what, exactly?”

 

Jim shoved his hands in his pockets. He was dressed in civvies, looking alarmingly like the cocky young townie McCoy had met on a shuttle four years ago. He was walking a little stiffly, but that was as like to be due to how tight his jeans were as to any lingering effects of his death. “Is it peach season in Georgia, yet?”

 

McCoy snorted. “It’s always peach season in Georgia.”

 

Jim nodded, as though that decided something. “I’m coming with you.”

 

McCoy stopped, shifting his duffle bag to the other shoulder, waiting for the punchline.

 

“‘Recovery is promising but needs continued observation,’” Jim quoted in a monotone. The idiot had read his leave orders after all. “‘A visit with family or friends is highly recommended and as strength returns some kind of physical activity - swimming, hiking, skiing, etc - would be beneficial to provide mental and physical stimulation and rebuild musculature and motor skills.’”

 

“I meant to take a ski trip to Banff like you were always doing on Academy breaks,” McCoy scratched behind his ear, squinting at Jim, “not to follow your physician home to his podunk Georgia town.”

 

Jim’s jaw clenched, and he relaxed it with a visible effort. “A ski trip. With who, exactly, Bones? ‘Family or friends,’ you said. My mom and Sam are off-planet. Spock and Uhura left for New Vulcan this morning and the rest of the bridge crew are already off on your ‘assignments.’ And if you suggest Gary Mitchell I will assume you suffered head trauma after all.”  Jim spread his arms. “All I got left is my bones, Bones.”

 

“How poetic,” Bones grumbled, but he started towards the shuttle again without trying to shrug Jim off.

 

Trotting beside him, Jim stopped when Bones showed every intention of making straight for the station instead of pitstopping at his room. “You’re going in that?”

 

“In what?” Jim’s gesture took in his uniform. He shrugged and hefted his bag. “Got plenty of civvies in here for when we get there.”

 

Jim hunched his shoulders. “Everyone in a uniform is being treated like a celebrity, out in the world.”

 

Bones looked at his watch and rolled his eyes. “I do not have time for whatever it is your problem is. Come on.”

 

He started to get it, though, when they got to the station and the civilians manning the shuttle came to a version of attention that was so overdone it set Bones’s teeth on edge. Beside him, Kirk took refuge in his captainy stance and an aloof nod that acknowledged their attentiveness without encouraging it. He was glad they’d been running late, cutting short whatever pre-flight effusions might have awaited them. As it was, Jim fell asleep almost immediately, and when his head drooped onto McCoy’s shoulder, he gave in too and let himself tumble into sleep. 

 

When he awoke they were descending, afternoon melding into evening, and Jim was at work on something official looking. When McCoy grumbled that he was supposed to be on leave, and work was officially banned per his leave assignment, Jim only nodded at the PADD in McCoy’s lap, and he had to bite his cheek. Had he not fallen asleep he’d have been doing the same. When they touched down in Chattanooga they were treated to a repeat performance, the locals greeting him by name, once again the famous face of Starfleet medical, thanks, he assumed, to the continuous vids that had been running all month spinning his miraculous rescue of their golden boy. Jim, with his hair pushed down on his forehead and shoulders hunched under a leather jacket, was not recognized until McCoy was picking up the key for his rental groundcar and this time McCoy would easily see the strain in the taut lines of Jim’s neck with the effort of holding his tongue.

 

They slid into the cool interior of the car and McCoy peeled off his uniform jacket and threw it into the back with the bags. He started up the car and thumbed off the autopilot; he’d done this trip a dozen times in the past four years, he could get there in his sleep and he liked the feel of the steering wheel under his hands, the power of feeling the car respond to his touch.

 

“You drive?” Jim looked impressed, watching McCoy wrap his hands around the wheel.

 

“What were you expecting, a horse and carriage?”

 

“Given where we are?” Jim looked around at the dark night, “I wouldn’t have been too surprised. Why didn’t we land in Atlanta?”

 

“I like to drive.” The drive home helped him unwind, detach himself from McCoy-the-CMO and ease back into his role of nephew, daddy, ex-husband.

 

“Jesus, is it always this dark out here?”

 

McCoy didn’t answer, but Jim filled the silence with another question; “Where are we staying?”

 

“I have a room at a hotel outside Atlanta.”

 

“A hotel? Shit, I though you were going home, don’t you always stay with some aunt?”

 

“I am.” He had a bottle of Aldeberan whiskey in his bag planning to keep him company overnight. “They’re not expecting me until tomorrow.”

 

Jim frowned, muttering, “Hotel, dammit.”

 

McCoy glanced into his mirror, looking back towards the station where the girls at the rental desk were probably still staring after them, and heaved a sigh. “I could call my aunt Louise, see if she minds taking me a day early. If she’ll even take _you_ at all.”

 

Jim smiled slightly, and McCoy made the call. It was ten minutes later, as they were passing into Georgia, that Jim noticed the moon.

 

=^=

 

“This is unreal,” Jim murmured again, settling back into the embrace of his seat but not surrendering his view of the moon and, now, the stars that were starting to pierce the uniform canvas of the sky. 

 

Bones looked at him again, studying his face in the meager light of the cabin. Jim looked relaxed, and as the tension fell away so did the years. Sometime in the last year the lines around his eyes and mouth had etched down deep like an old man’s but in this moment they only served to remind him of the way Jim’s eyes would almost disappear sometimes when he smiled, that face-splitting grin along with that bone-shaking laugh that was as good as a magnet to most of the population of this and every other world they had encountered. 

 

Even the ones he hadn’t been able to show his face to. On Nibiru, wrapped up like a mummy and speaking through the Universal Translator, that brainchild of Spock’s mother now being carried on by Uhura, Jim had talked his way into their sacred temple long enough to get a bead on them and their culture and steal the one artifact they were sure to chase out of the kill zone.  

 

 _I hate this!_ McCoy had shouted, and meant it. Still meant it, dammit. But he’d take Jim’s harebrained schemes involving jumping off cliffs any day over what they’d just been through. Blind vengeance and untested weapons, closing his ears and mind to the objections of those closest to him, those who were supposed to provide the checks and balances that made a ship like theirs _work._ First Spock, then Scotty, then Bones himself had been summarily brushed aside while Jim rushed them headlong into a catastrophe that, by some counts, had lost them as many lives, between the Enterprise and the San Francisco attacks, as Nero had in the air battle over Vulcan. All in the name of vengeance for the death of the man who was the reason Jim was sitting here beside him today instead of locked up in a penitentiary in Iowa somewhere, or worse.

 

McCoy knew that it had been out of loyalty to Pike. Knew it down to his bones. Jim might be one to take advantage of any tactical situation that came his way - more, to see the potential for tactical advantage three and four moves out, it’s why he was so irritatingly good at chess - and Lord knew he had no reason to love the Klingons, but he wasn’t like Marcus. This vendetta against the man who killed their captain-and-friend had come from as good a place in Jim’s heart as the crushing need for revenge could come from. 

 

But that hadn’t kept him, once he’d woken up and it was over, from adding Pike, his memory and character, to his arsenal as he dove back into the game. McCoy had known Jim long enough to know the tone he used when he was talking about his father. George Kirk, the hero of the Kelvin, the reason 800 of Starfleet’s best and brightest were returned safely home to their families. He was an anecdote. And now it was Christopher Pike, my captain and my friend, the man who gave me his ship, that he was turning into an anecdote. _Pike believed in me, so should you._ Pike’s name packed quite a wallop, in political circles and the public both. He’d been the golden boy of a generation now aging into nostalgia about Their Day. And he’d aged with them, silvering into the admiral who fought the home battles, who could make speeches about the mission and the value of Starfleet, who could say the words _peace keeping and humanitarian armada_ without them ever sounding canned, or stale. He made a bright future sound possible, he made hard work sound honorable, and he lived by his words. 

 

McCoy looked at the kid - because he was that, still, even if the rest of the world had forgotten - sitting next to him, and wondered how much of that Jim realized on an intellectual level, and how much of what Jim had venerated in Pike was simple reaction to the kind of authority Pike had wielded, the adulation he’d received.

 

It seemed to him as though Jim had been starting to understand how much power he had over people, but that he wasn’t invincible. Spock had told him, briefly, about their meeting with Admiral Pike. McCoy had been powerfully reminded of the day the session had been called to resolve the Kobayashi Maru debacle and Bones, walking with Jim as always, had been there to hear Jim’s gleeful prediction that the session was going to be an ode to his brilliance. It was just like Jim to assume that he and Spock had been called in for promotion, and it was only Pike who could have delivered the demotion in any way that would make Jim think seriously about his actions. And in trying to analyze his own grief, McCoy had realized that he was mourning the loss of what Jim might have become under Pike’s direction.

 

Jim took a breath like he was about to speak, then frowned, leaning towards McCoy to look out his window. “What the hell is _that_?”

 

“That,” McCoy cleared his throat, “is the compound of the congregation of the Come-Agains.” Jim looked baffled, McCoy snorted, looking again at the monstrosity that had caught Jim’s attention, a gigantic cross lit to high heaven with cloud-piercing lights. “They’re a church. They don’t actually call themselves that, but everyone else does. They’re always getting light pollution citations but they don’t seem to care. It’s like the more everyone hates ‘em, the louder it authorizes ‘em to yell.”

 

Religion might have been a thing of the past over most of the planet, but there were those who clung to it yet and the ones what hadn’t shipped off planet to colonize somewhere had come mostly to the states, and most of them congregated in the south where there were still relics of the region’s long and proud history of never bowing easy to change whether it came in the form of different colors of skin or different ways of loving or different planets of origin. 

 

“That’s crazy.”

 

“Hmm. You’ll never forget where you are, down here.”

 

And wasn’t that just the peaches on the ice cream. That was his mother’s phrase, through and through. Ma was born on Cerberus, a child of the ‘fleet, and she’d never felt at home with her feet on the ground, much less planted in Georgia. But Georgia was where she’d been stationed, and Georgia was where she’d met her husband and made her home. 

 

McCoy swerved his thoughts away from his father as he twitched the wheel to bring them sailing around a curve in the road, realizing that Jim was still sitting pressed close against him, watching the night pass by the window on McCoy’s side. He didn’t move, or nudge him away, or give any other indication that he’d noticed, which would like as not turn Jim skittish and send him sliding back to his own side. Even in the warm night, and even after everything, the feel of Jim’s leather jacket sliding against the bare skin of his arm was electric. Proximity to Jim filled a hole in his chest that he preferred, most days, not to prod at.

 

Whatever they were (had been, almost had been, sorta been) in their Academy days was long over. Gone were the parties and bar fights as, not long after they enlisted, Jim realized (all on his own, too, imagine that) that honors and acclaim rewarded diligence and hard work (and sobriety). With achievement came recognition and with recognition came responsibility. And with orders and the uniform had come a set of rules that McCoy had expected Jim to treat as flippantly as he did every other set of rules that had clearly been written without him in mind. But, God knows why, it turns out that Jim Kirk holds the rules governing _fraternization_ in high regard. Funny, then, McCoy would think sometimes after a drink or two in the officer’s lounge, that he would write up such a convincing report requesting the normal process of separation be waived in the case of Uhura and Spock. But not so funny from another angle - _I want both of them on my ship so fuck the rules that say some little thing like a relationship is going to keep me from having what I want._

 

 _Some little thing,_ because that’s exactly what it was, to Jim. Sulu, who as it turns out is a very interesting drinking buddy, told him the night after they got their commission for the Enterprise that Kirk had laid ten to one odds they’d break up before they even left Earth. “The guy’s a machine!” was a common complaint heard around Bones’s quarters when they were both off duty. And how could you love a machine? Or, and this was the more relevant question in McCoy’s opinion, how do you make a machine love you? 

 

 _Well apparently you have to die._ The car veered as he flexed an angry hand agains the wheel. Spock had carried Jim from Engineering to the Medical Bay at the head of a column of mourners, the Enterprise’s very own Achille and fucking Patroclus. 

 

“The hell is going on, Bones?” The sudden momentum made Jim slide back toward the middle of the seat and he was looking hard at McCoy, all attempt at levity evaporating. “Are you that pissed I crashed your vacation?”

 

McCoy shifted in his seat, his right side feeling cold from the loss of commingled body heat. “Oh for the love of…if I’da minded, I’da told you.”

 

“Your accent gets thick when you’re lying to me.”

 

“Or maybe it is you just don’t ever listen to me.” Taking his eyes from the road and letting the car take over, McCoy held Jim’s stare until the younger man looked away first.

 

“Yeah,” he said, his defeated tone that he uses when he’s decided an argument’s not worth his time. “Maybe.”

 

“No,” Bones gripped the wheel til his knuckles turned white, but left it on autopilot. “Not ‘maybe,’ sweetheart, _definitely._ You didn’t listen to me at the Academy and you never listen to me on the ship, you can’t even obey your basic medical leave orders—“

 

“You told me to go have an adventure with my friends, Bones! That is what your goddamn leave order amounted to. Did you take two seconds to think, hm, what friends is he gonna take with him on this mandated adventure?” He held up his hands and started ticking off names. “Meg’s on Starbase One, thank fuck, but Haven, Julian, Gaila, Fenny, Adrian, Hannity…they’re all dead, Bones, goddamn _dead._ Brackett won’t see me and Amanda is still in a coma, Kevin’s in isolation and goddamn Novak…”

 

The bitterness underlying his words kept McCoy from recognizing immediately what this was. A casualty list, just like his. He supposed they all had them, it was crazy to assume that Jim wasn’t carrying his own just because he wasn’t a doctor, just because they hadn’t died on his table, or before he could get to them. 

 

It was crazy to assume anything about James T. Kirk, and crazy to assume nothing. But still. The bastard never let anybody _in._ No one got to him. Now, McCoy realized and recognized that he was not the poster boy for the let’s-share-our-feelings club. But he also had ten years on the kid beside him, and he was, after all, a surgeon. He’d been trained to handle life and death. Other peoples’, at least. He sighed and tried to detach himself from his anger.

 

“And exactly none of that is your fault,” McCoy said, reaching over and taking hold of Jim’s wrist. The words were said with a conviction he hadn’t felt even two weeks ago. But he felt different, now. Jim had flown off the handle, yes. Had taken his chance to wage a vendetta against Khan, yes. But he’d been led by the nose every step of the way, pitted against his better sense and the values and regulations he’d sworn to uphold, by a force greater than himself. 

 

His conviction was lost on Jim, who spat, “Which you wouldn’t have to say if it was actually true.” But he didn’t pull away from McCoy’s hold.

 

“Whatever’s goin’ on in that crazy corn-fed mind o’ yours, I don’t know, Jim. Since you woke up I haven’t known whether to tiptoe around you or try an’ talk straight sense at you.”

 

“I don’t listen. I know.”

 

“You’re damn right you don’t. But you also don’t talk. I mean, hell, you talk more’n anyone I ever met, and that’s including my seven-year-old daughter. But I don’t always know how to tell the truth from the official line, anymore.”

 

“Bones.” Jim turned his hand in McCoy’s grasp, sliding so their hands lay palm to palm. “I don’t lie. I just don’t.”

 

“I know that you believe that. And I know you are better at playing people than you’ve ever seemed to realize. Jim, you’re twelve years younger than the youngest captain on record. You ever stop and think about that?”

 

Jim drew his hands back into his lap, digging at a hangnail on his left thumb. “Every day.” He didn’t look up to ask, “You’re not going to ask me if I’m—if I was sleeping with Pike, are you?”

 

Bones rolled his eyes, heat creeping up under his standard-issue collar. “Jesus.”

 

“Jesus,” Jim agreed, looking out his window where another religious compound was intruding on the quiet dark of the scene. “Jesus, who has nothing at all to do with this.”

 

He’d heard the rumors before, the bitter and jealous vitriol from those looking for anything to discount the idea that Jim might actually have won his command on his own merit. But he never listened, because he knew it wasn’t true. But what he didn’t know…what he’d never asked Jim… “Did you want to?” 

 

“Want to what?”

 

“Don’t play dumb, Jim. Not a good look on you.”

 

Jim slumped down in his seat, legs sprawling. “Would it matter? He’s gone.”

 

“Yeah, _hell_ , yeah, it would matter, Jim.”

 

“Why?” 

 

The kid sounded genuinely curious. He bit down on the words, _It would make a whole lotta things make a whole lot more sense._ Doing his best to keep his voice neutral, choose his words carefully, “We’re all grieving Pike’s loss, an’ it’s compounded by the fact his death was what kicked off this whole…”

 

“Disaster?” Kirk supplied drily. “What’s your point, doctor?”

 

“My point,” Bones said bluntly, Jim only called him _doctor_ when he was about ten seconds from walking away, “is that with one notable exception you have shut everyone out since you woke up and I don’t know where to begin with you. If I knew you were mourning Pike that way, I’d at least have an idea of how to help you.”

 

It was dark but he could see how Jim’s face twisted and his hands flexed against his knees. Fully expecting an enraged outburst along the lines of _what makes you think I need your help_? he was unprepared for how calm Jim sounded as he asked, “And who’s the lucky ‘notable exception’?”

 

So he told the truth. “Spock.”

 

Jim’s chin came up. “What?”

 

Bones gave a short laugh. “You light up like the Come-Again cross whenever he graces you with his pointy presence.” 

 

Jim was staring hard at him, silent for what felt like a long, long time. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Jealous, Bones?”

 

Held by Jim’s stare, Bones almost missed their exit, twirling the wheel just in time to send them peeling off the highway, slowing to a creep in the quiet neighborhood streets.

 

“That was an _exit_?” Jim craned to look back behind them. “This is Atlanta? We could be anywhere, you can’t see anything with all these fuckin’ trees. This is incredible.” 

 

“This is Alpharetta,” he corrected, relief at the interruption making his arms and legs feel rubbery. “And you will get a tellin’ off if you call it a suburb, too. Even though that’s what it is.”

 

“Well, good thing I’ve got a native tour guide to watch my tongue for me.”

 

Bones glanced sharply at Jim in time to catch his smirk. He turned away and gave all his attention to the road.

 

Five more minutes brought them gliding in to the port of a huge New Colonial style house. 50-year-old Magnolia trees stood on either side of the front porch, shivering and shimmering in the light of the full moon.

 

Jim was still looking at him. “Seems late to knock on the door and expect them to entertain us. Couldn’t just sneak in the back, say hello in the morning?”

 

 _And make our own entertainment, you mean?_ Bones ran his hand through his hair, licking his lips and considering the front door. A glance back at Jim showed he still had that too-intense look fixed on him. Bones shook his head. “Nah. My aunt Louise would be madder’n a wet hen if we were to slight her hospitality like that.” He arched an eyebrow. “She’s one lady whose feathers you don’t wanna ruffle.”

 

Jim groaned, hand over his eyes. “What did I tell you about the metaphors, Bones?”

 

“I’m on leave.” He grinned and pulled himself out of the car, snagging his bag from the back and walking up to the door before Jim could protest further. Those bedroom eyes would get him everything, given enough time; the trick was to break contact before his resolve had a chance to crack.

 

=^=

 

A quick word in Aunt Louise’s ear, _Jim is worn down by all the fussin’, best not mention anything about his being a hero. Or about the attack. Or…anything_ was enough. 

 

Sitting out in the back lawn where there was a gap in the trees that afforded them a breathtaking view of the sky. Aunt Louise and Uncle Charles surprised Jim first by being awake (“It’s not that late, Jim, and they’re not that old,”), and then by being perfectly ready to pass around Bones’s bottle of Aldebaran whiskey after Bones declined their offer of iced tea, not wanting any more caffeine in his system, please and thanks. Aunt Louise, bless her, treated Jim like she did everyone who came through her doors, as a delightful and fascinating new friend who could do her no better service than to eat her food and listen to her decade of stories about the kids (which unfortunately included young Leonard) and their antics.

 

Jim began to calm down, stopped giving Bones _that look_ , and relaxed into the conversation. Bones let it all swirl around him, wondering if he could have taken that look as a promise; if he could have taken that look to bed. How it would have been. Angry, most likely. Like after the Kobayashi Maru, the first time. _I don’t understand what’s broken, and I don’t know how to fix it._ Jim wasn’t right with himself, his answers about Pike and Spock had been less than straightforward. Jim revealed more of himself in bed than anywhere else, but it wouldn’t be right. Even if he’d wanted to, which he wasn’t at all sure about just now.

 

Midnight approached. The moon wandered off to play in another hemisphere, leaving them in whispery darkness. Uncle Charles reached out for his wife’s hand, smiling at her and suggesting they leave the night to the young folks. She patted his cheek and stood, bending to kiss first McCoy, “Goodnight, Lenny,” and then Jim, “And you, Jimmy. Sleep well, we’re so glad y’all are here with us. Anything you need, Lenny you help him find it.”

 

Left alone, Jim got up to take the vacated chair beside Bones. “Hey, Lenny.” 

 

Bones rolled his eyes. “Dear god, no.”

 

Jim laughed and turned to look after Louise and Charles, watched them disappear into the house. “They’re great.”

 

“I know it.”

 

“Like, really great. Um…genuine. Real people living real lives. That’s…She’s your dad’s sister?”

 

“Mm.” _Real people living real lives. And what would you call what we’re doing, Jim?_

 

“Older or younger?”

 

“Younger.”

 

“You have other family here, though, right?”

 

“Yeah. Couple cousins and the like.”

 

“But you stay here because of Joanna, right?”

 

“You’re not very curious, are you?” He sighed. “Yeah. Louise and Jocelyn’s mom are best friends. So Joss trusts her, and she trusts me with Jo so long as Louise is here.”

 

Jim lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a little harsh.”

 

Bones shrugged. Harsh, maybe, but true, and he lived with that. Joss trusted Louise even if she was a McCoy, in part at least because she hadn’t exactly taken Leonard’s side in the divorce, even without knowing all the details. Such as, for example, how deep that bottle was he crawled into after his dad…

 

“And they’ve got kids? Your cousins?”

 

Bones nodded. “Not the ones that live around here, though.”

 

Jim sighed through his nose, leaning his head back. “I kinda can’t imagine leaving, if it was me.”

 

Jim did look like he was completely at home. A fixture, they would call it. At ease and sprawled on the lawn chair, ice clinking gently in his tumbler. Bones was struck by the thought that Louise and Charles could do worse for a son. Had, in fact. Their _real life_ had involved a handful of very real disappointments and heartbreaks. 

 

“Charlie Jr, their oldest, is in jail,” Bones said quietly, wondering if Jim would want to hear this. Thinking maybe he needed to. 

 

“What?” Jim sat up, incredulous. “Why?”

 

“Repeated incidents of petty theft.”

 

Jim craned his neck to look at the mansion behind them. “Um, I ask again, why?”

 

Bones shrugged. “The thrill of it, at first. And then his parents cut him off, stopped supporting him and bailing him out, and he couldn’t hold a job. He turned thievin’ to a career and a year ago he broke some kid’s jaw who tried to stop him.”

 

“Jesus. That’s ridiculous.”

 

“And then Hannah stopped talking to them when they cut Charlie off. She’s a nurse in Canada somewhere now, never calls or visits.”

 

Jim dragged his thumb around the rim of his glass, glaring down into its depths. 

 

Bones decided to finish the list, offer a little redemption, “But Chris, though, is all right. Doesn’t do much, works at a fuel station in Georgia, comes home for holidays.” Looking right at Jim, he saw the way his eyes widened at the third kid’s name.

 

Shaking his head, Jim said, “You could do more than come home for holidays. With a family like this? Shit.”

 

“No family’s ever perfect. Even if they put a lot of effort into looking like they are.”

 

Jim’s throat was working soundlessly, his eyes dark and distant, fixed on something Bones couldn’t see. When he spoke his voice was thick, trapped, “This one time, Pike was telling me about…that his…” He broke off, shaking his head, and downed the rest of his whiskey, reaching for the bottle.

 

Jim’s strangled words wrapped around Bones’s ribcage, squeezing hard, all the breath leaving his lungs in a rush. Jesus goddamned Christ. The desire to reach out to Jim, hold him tight and make his body a shield against every shitty thing that was out to get him, was almost overpowering and he felt about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. 

 

He took the bottle from Jim before he could top off his glass completely, splashing a bit more into his own and setting it down in the grass on his other side from Jim. Waiting to see if he’d continue.

 

“How do they keep it so dark around here?” Jim asked, his voice an unsteady staccato, looking up at the sky. “Did you learn the constellations and shit when you were a kid? That’s the northern cross, I know that one.”

 

Bones didn’t look at him. Turning the glass in his hands, he asked slowly, “I ever tell you about my dad?

 

Jim looked at him and then quickly away, shaking his head, holding his glass tight but not drinking.

 

Bones leaned back, trying to let go of some of the tension in this limbs. “He was a surgeon.”

 

“That much I know.”

 

“He’s dead.”

 

Jim nodded again. “That much I figured.”

 

Bones scrubbed a hand over his face. “He never lived more’n a hundred miles away from Peachtree City, where he was born. I was born there, too. He…he could be real stupid, sometimes, about his own safety. He was always trying some new dumb thing. My mom used to say for someone supposed to be dedicated to preserving life he sure didn’t seem to think much of his own.” Bones shook his head, sipping his drink. “Medicine runs in my family, I guess you could say. They met at the ‘fleet rehab center in Atlanta, ma got stationed there right when dad was sent to recover from having half his bones broken testing out these rocket boots meant for mountaineering. Fell halfway down Mount LeConte. Never stopped him from trying the next thing, though. Mom says. Not til he started having us kids. He still went camping, sometimes, took us along to go hiking and boating, when he had the time. But never anything dangerous like that again.”

 

Jim sounded calm again when he cleared his throat and commented, “The way you never talk about him, I always assumed he—“

 

“Was an asshole?” Jim nodded, Bones drank. “Yeah. Well. He wasn’t. He was a good man, and he loved us. Loved my ma.”

 

“So what…?”

 

“So my sister was born, and he started working more and playing less. My ma says he finally heard her, begging him to be more careful for the sake of his family.”

 

“How did he die?”

 

Typical Jim. Straight for the jugular.

 

He could tell him. He could say the words, hear them out loud and out in the open, watch Jim’s face as he processed them, find out for himself if sharing a burden like that would make it lighter on him or, as he’d been telling himself all these years, make it worse knowing someone else had to bear the weight of what had happened.

 

No - the weight of _what he’d done._ There was a very real reason he shouldn’t say another word about this to Jim. And of course, perversely, that made him want to all the more.

 

Jim had been watching him in the dark and Lord knew what he’d seen on his face but he didn’t say anything, waiting for Bones to speak.

 

“Am I talking,” he asked, “to my captain, or to my friend?” 

 

Jim frowned. “It’s just me, Bones.”

 

Bones tilted his head, thoughtful. “That doesn’t mean what it used to.” He continued talking over Jim’s objection, lacing his fingers together to illustrate his point, “The man and the chair are growing together - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just…taking some adjustment all ‘round.”

 

Jim’s eyes travelled from Bones’s hands to his face before saying tightly, “This is off the record, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

 

Bones nodded. Set his glass down and folded his hands behind his head, leaning back to look up at the stars. He’d told this story to himself a hundred, a thousand times. It always started off the same way. “Jocelyn Darnell was exactly the type of girl everyone expected me to marry.”

 

Jim groaned and Bones heard the unmistakeable sound of him downing his drink, but he allowed Bones to continue without comment. 

 

“We weren’t engaged but everyone talked about us like we were, even my dad, who loved her. Probably…” he broke off, waving his hand. “Probablies don’t matter. The fact is, my dad got sick, and I married her. We rushed the wedding so he could be there, in sound mind at least.”

 

Jim gave a low whistle. “What’d he have?”

 

“Pyrrhoneuritis.”

 

“Not a doctor, over here.”

 

“Called Bowden’s Malady.”

 

“Oof,” Jim winced. “That’s painful, I hear. But treatable, right?”

 

“Now it is, yeah.”

 

“Oh. Oh. But not then?”

 

Bones shook his head, laying the backs of his laced fingers over his eyes. “It usually attacks the elderly and the very young. People whose immune systems are already compromised. Back then, getting it was a two, three month sentence, most of it unconscious while your body ate itself away. But my dad…shit. He was gettin’ up there but he wasn’t old. He was strong, perfect health.”

 

“When was this?” Jim murmured when Bones stopped talking. 

 

“Right about eight years ago.”

 

“Before Jo?”

 

“Just before. And he, well. He didn’t fade quickly like most cases, he was awake and conscious for all the agony of his body turning on him. He stayed stoic for my ma but when I came to see him just a couple weeks after the wedding he told me the strongest painkillers weren’t doin’ anything.”

 

“And there wasn’t anything you could do.”

 

“Except do what he asked me.”

 

“What did he ask you?”

 

“To help him die.”

 

“Fuck,” Jim muttered, and a second later a strong hand was gripping his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

 

Bones opened his eyes. Jim was looking earnestly at him, so he lifted his lips in a wry smile and shrugged. “That’s how it goes.”

 

“How long…”

 

“Before they developed the cure? Less’n six months.” Four months, one week, three days, actually.

 

“You didn’t tell anyone.”

 

Again with the jugular. “No.”

 

“And then Joanna was born…?”

 

“By the time she was born I was more dead than alive myself. No one should deserves a wreck like that for a - well. My own dad…he was a good man. And even he couldn’t ever find the time or the right way of doing it. Of being a father, I mean.” Bones cleared his throat, cutting the self-pity act mercifully short. None of that was important. It was self-pity that had put the bottle into his hands in the first place, had kept him from ever getting to know his baby girl until she was half grown up and more’n half scared of him from the memories of her parents yelling at each other almost from the moment she was born. 

 

Jim turned sideways in his chair so that he was sitting facing Bones, planting his elbows on his knees. “I’m hearing you say that you thought your dad was a good person, but a shitty father. And that you think you’re a shitty person, so rather than inflict yourself on your wife and daughter, you left.”

 

Bones looked at him, wishing that was true, that was how it happened. Jim squinted at him, reading him. “Or, is that the line you use now to justify everything? Cuz the way you always told it before, I thought Jocelyn left _you_ , kicked you out. Took everything.”

 

“Everything but my bones,” Bones amended, smiling in spite of himself.

 

Jim let out a breath that was almost a laugh, leaning forward to wrap his hand around the back of Bones’s neck, pressing their foreheads together. _My Bones, now_ , he might as well have said it out loud.

 

Bones found his hand was resting on Jim’s knee, his eyes closed, his heart racing for a minute, two, before settling back down to a steady rhythm, his whole body glowing with the simple joy of a moment like this, closeness that wasn’t possessive or a fight for dominance or a dare to walk away.

 

“When Pike was still in the wheelchair, but before we shipped out the first time, I went by his place to give him some news about something.” Jim shook his head and pulled back from Bones, eyes bright. “God damn, I don’t even remember what it was, anymore. And it didn’t really matter anyway, not even then, it was just an excuse to go see him. You know.”

 

Yeah, Bones knew. He’d given Jim a speech or two about giving the Admiral breathing room while he was recovering, but Jim had never seemed to listen, shrugging off his advice like he knew better. Which, maybe, he had.

 

“And anyway, Pike was there talking to his sister on the vids, she’d just had a baby. He let me come in and introduced me, I got to chat with his sister and the rest of her family and see the kid, who was just this wrinkly little speck, do you know how ridiculous babies look? I was there probably an hour before they hung up, and it wasn’t weird for even a second. And he was so…happy. Almost started crying and didn’t even care that I was there. He told me, he hardly ever got to see his family in person, the job always kept him too busy. But he did everything he could to be around in other ways. Call, so his nieces and nephews knew his face. Send presents and congratulate them on ball games and report cards and stuff. He talked about the sacrifices he’d had to make to get where he was, but that he’d decided it was worth it in the end, to do everything he could in the name of leaving a better galaxy for those who came after him.

 

“I was thinking about that when we were on leave on Tellar Prime and I arranged that shuttle for you go to Earth to see Joanna, when her dog died. I was thinking about how, you don’t just have a daughter, you _are a father._ You hate asking for anything, especially from me, especially something inconvenient like sending you home from the middle of nowhere. But you did. You knew how much she needed you and you put all your own habits aside to be there for her. And so I call bullshit on you deciding you’re not good enough to be her father. Pike said, having kids in his life was the best thing that ever happened to him. Cleared up his thinking about things like his place in the universe, and the thought of his own death. He knew what, and who, he’d die to protect.”

 

Bones tried to imagine the indomitable Admiral Pike, sitting in his wheelchair and talking candidly like that to James T. Kirk, Starfleet’s golden playboy. It was a surprisingly easy image to conjure. “He told you all that, huh.”

 

Jim ducked his head self-consciously. “Yeah. I don’t think I ever told him whatever I’d gone to tell him that day. He took me out for a drink and we just…”

 

“Bonded?” Bones asked, smiling.

 

Jim laughed. “Sure. Call it whatever. He told me about his family, and. Um. About mine.”

 

“Your parents?”

 

“Yeah. Did you know, when Pike joined up all he wanted to be was a paper-pusher? Well, a professor, I guess. Or a diplomat. He hadn’t really decided, he was just starting his second round of grad school when my mom and dad shipped out with the Kelvin. It was researching that, what happened, doing his dissertation, that pushed him towards active duty. Isn’t that weird?”

 

“Weird that someone would be inspired by your dad’s service? No.” Bones shook his head. “Not at all.”

 

Jim smiled down at his hands, bowing his head as he pondered that. “When I first met him, he recognized me in two seconds. Called me ‘my father’s son.’”

 

“And then he dared you to join Starfleet,” Bones smiled. He’d heard this story before, maybe never appreciated just what it had meant to Jim.

 

Jim snorted. “Yeah, I guess he did.”

 

“You’ve got a habit of making some pretty stupid decisions for the sake of a dare.”

 

Jim sobered, and Bones kicked himself. He hadn’t meant to kill the mood. His smile a second ago had been real.

 

“Not that one,” Jim said. “That was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

 

“There’s a lot of people living today who agree with you.”

 

“And a lot of people dead because I brought a crazy superman back to Earth.”

 

Bones shook his head. “You’re taking blame for more than your due.”

 

Jim let his head hang, pressing fingers into his temples. He growled, “I fell for that bastard’s line every. step. of the way. He played me. I heard his bullshit about ‘doing anything for his family’ and I ate it up because I am a goddamned idiot and I didn’t think anyone could say that and mean it like he did, and be so cruel. So fucking evil. I am no different from Nero.” He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, shaking his head. “Would you believe I never understood him, how even the death of his _entire planet_ could drive him to try and do what he did. I always thought something must have been wrong with him, he was fucked up before any of it. And here all it takes to send me over the edge is one attack. One death. I could have gotten everyone on board my ship killed. I almost did. I--”

 

Bones couldn’t listen any more to the razor’s edge of self-loathing in his friend’s voice. “There is nothing wrong with you, Jim. No one takes the unexpected death of a parent easy. It’s just not everyone has access to a ship as big as yours.”

 

Jim lifted bright eyes to Bones, lips parted. _Go on._

 

“You acted out of love. And that muddies the waters, I think. You never shoulda been allowed to fly off half cocked like that, and if Starfleet procedure had been kept to, you wouldn’t have. And that’s Pike’s legacy, for you. You were trying to do right by him at a moment you needed him most, and he wasn’t there for you. It wasn’t fair to you, Jim. And it wasn’t your fault.”

 

Breath coming shallow, voice a faint ribbon of sound in the dark, Jim said, chasing some train of thought Bones couldn’t follow, “He bragged about those kids, his sister’s kids, like they were his own. Like in his HDS class, you heard how he talked about Starfleet, how he’d glow over those… _boring_ as hell diplomatic success stories. It was like that. And it was like that, the way he told me he saw greatness in me. That he believed in me.”

 

Jim breathed in deep through his nose, blinking rapidly. “He went to bat for me when he really didn’t have to, and he took so much shit for it. Komack and Marcus were already making his life hell for him. But he did it for me. After dressing me down and taking my ship away, he came and found me again, he called me ‘son’ and said it was gonna be all right.

 

“When he was talking to me, at that bar in Iowa, I think what got to me was how he acted like he was already disappointed in me, and he didn’t even know me. But not like the way your probation officer says ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ when you know they were sitting around eating donuts and waiting for you to do exactly what you just did. It was like…I mean, you can’t be disappointed in someone if you don’t also care what happens to them, what they do with themselves. Right?”

 

Jim’s eyes flashed in the darkness, seeking confirmation, his hope so raw and desperate it made Bones ache. It was a moment for words more profound than either of them was comfortable with, so in the end he said, simply, “Yeah. I think that’s right, Jim.”

 

Releasing his white-knuckled grip on the edge of his chair, Jim slumped forward, head falling to rest in his hands, shoulders shaking, Bones reached out and settled a hand on the back of his neck, thumb grazing over his ear and finding the pulse point behind it. Holding steady for Jim as he wept for Christopher Pike, his friend and the father he’d always deserved and found too late. 

 

Minutes, some number of them that Bones didn’t count. Words, interchangeable but meaningful, though he’d forget later what was said. At some point, the realization that he was there, in Georgia, which always before had felt like the place he would forever be a kid, always be the place he left his baggage, his dirty laundry. The place he came to be saddled with a past he was none too proud of and haunted by the ghosts of a hundred memories. But now, there, _here_ , with Jim, his captain, friend, etc, the list went on and would continue on, he hoped, a long damn time, he felt freer than he had in a long time. Maybe ever. Felt like himself, like a man with a future not just a past. Jim had lapsed into peaceful silence, head thrown back to look at the stars. Bones lifted his long-neglected drink. He considered it for a long moment and then put it aside, and for good measure put the stopper in the bottle as well.

 

He looked up to find that Jim had been watching him. Bones could see that his eyes were still red, but his smile was there too. He looked calm. And he stood, stretching out his back and then reaching a hand down to Bones. Condensation from his drink slicked their palms, but Bones just held on tighter. Jim pulled him to his feet. “Bed?”

 

Bones leaned in to press his forehead to Jim’s. That felt good, felt right, like the way the air that left Jim’s lungs in a surprised breath swelled Bones’s chest as he breathed in deep, holding on. He nodded, eyes open, and pulled Jim into the house with an arm around his shoulders.

 

 

=^= Epilogue =^=

 

Bones wandered down about two minutes before Jim was going to give in and let Jo run up and jump on his bed to wake him. Hilarious as that would have been, and Jim definitely planned on being there to witness it, he couldn’t get the picture of Bones’s weary eyes and haggard face out of his head. Neither of them had slept much the week before, Bones with his leave assignments and Jim with his dogged determination not to rest before he’d personally contacted the families of every one of his deceased crewmembers. The task had left him ill and shaking every night since he’d been deemed well enough to have access to the system. There was still a virtual pile of them waiting for him, but they would have to wait a few more hours.

 

Right now, he was making grits.

 

“Good morning, sunshine,” Jim grinned, the first to spot Bones stumbling into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and tousled.

 

“Daddy!” Joanna took a flying leap off her chair and hurled herself at Bones. 

 

Jim stopped stirring, the scene punching him right in the gut. This was the man who thought he didn’t deserve his daughter’s love.

 

“Be careful, Joanna,” Jocelyn scolded, going unheard by anyone else as she righted Jo’s overturned chair.

 

Behind him, Aunt Louise urged him to carry on. Wouldn’t want them to burn.

 

Jim watched Bones from under his brows as the doctor, catching sight of his ex-wife, tried to smooth down his hair and appear as presentable as possible in wrinkled jeans and yesterday’s undershirt. 

 

With his daughter on his hip, he looked like the king of the world.

 

Jocelyn left, Bones relaxed, Joanna chattered.

 

Still holding her, Bones sidled up to Jim. “And just what the hell,” (“Daddy!” Joanna scolded, sounding eerily like her mother) “are you doing here, Jim?”

 

“Making breakfast for the slacker who slept in ’til noon.”

 

“It’s only nine in California. Is that grits?”

 

Aunt Louise gushed about how helpful Jim had been, how lovely it was that someone wanted to learn her recipe. Joanna talked over all of them about how a girl at her school liked to put jelly in her grits and how _gross_ that was and Bones suggested that maybe they should give it a try, what if her friend was on to something? He thought it sounded pretty good, didn’t Jim think that sounded like a good idea? And Jim played along while Joanna squealed in protest.

 

“Breakfast for lunch!” Jo announced when they all sat down, no jelly in sight. 

 

Uncle Charles took her hand and Louise’s hand, and Jim found himself linked with Bones on the one hand and Jo on the other as Charles took a minute to say how happy he was to have them all with him, and how it reminded him to be grateful for all the good fortune the had in their lives. Jim couldn’t help but stare at him - after the recital of their childrens’ failings last night, he wouldn’t have called them the most fortunate of people. Until, of course, he felt Bones squeeze his hand and realized everyone else was eating and he was still sitting there like an idiot. Bones could make up for a lot of things. And so could the little firecracker on his other side, who was already complaining that he didn’t make his grits as smooth as her mama did.

 

Bones reminded Jo of her manners, that Uncle Jim (and where had that come from?) had made these just for her, and as it was his first try, she should be forgiving and grateful to him. When Bones wasn’t looking, Jim stuck his tongue out at her. She stared openmouthed at him, and them blew out her cheeks and crossed her eyes, holding the face for less than a second before she burst out laughing.

 

“Thanks for breakfast,” Bones said to him quietly, under the cover of the others’ conversation. Beneath the table, he lay a hand on Jim’s knee.

 

Jim beamed at him, sliding his leg over to tap their toes together. “No problem.”

 

“They’re good,” Bones said, after a pause where he looked like he had something to say, and thought better of it.

 

“Yeah?” Jim shoveled a spoonful into his mouth. And then he thanked the good lord himself for all his practice in suppressing his gag reflex because Jesus Goddamn _Christ_ that was disgusting.

 

His attention reclaimed by his daughter, Bones hadn’t noticed his look of horror, and by the time he turned back Jim had gotten it under control. The rest of the family (even Jo, now that she’d loaded her serving up with almonds and maple syrup) was now praising his amateur cooking abilities, and beside him Bones shifted in his seat, this bizarre look of embarrassment tinged with pride flushing the skin under his stubble, and Jim swore to himself that he’d get through this meal with a smile on his face if it killed him. 

 

Because, mashed glue breakfast torture devices aside, there was nothing better than this.


	2. The Other Side of the Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joanna drags Jim and Bones along to her summer space camp as guests of honor, and the mood turns dark when they are brought face to face with evidence of the devastation Jim’s mad rush for vengeance has wrought in so many lives, and Bones faces an impossible choice - to stay in Georgia with his family or return to the Enterprise with his captain and friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place about a week after the events of The Stories We Tell In The Dark. And while of course I wouldn’t hate it if you went back and read that first, all you need to know from it is this: On leave in the aftermath of Khan's attack, Jim follows Bones home to Georgia, where they stay with McCoy's aunt Louise. McCoy's ex-wife Jocelyn trusts Louise and and therefore allows Joanna to stay with Bones when he visits if it’s at Louise’s house. They had a bit of a rocky start to their vacation, shouting at each other and hashing out all that had been hanging, unsaid, between them in the weeks since their encounter with Khan.
> 
>  
> 
> For my dearest ImpishTubist, because of reasons.  
> ( _I swear this was supposed to be light and fluffy and slightly cracky how did this happen I don’t even!! It’s just that these boys get in the room with each other and the angst explodes._ )

=^=

 

Jim and Bones sat blinking over their coffee. Aunt Louise and Joanna came in from the garden, carrying armloads of rhubarb and singing to each other, making up words to the tune of Moons Over Rigel 7. Joanna, giggling, trilled, “And the rhubarb is purple, don’t you know, cuz on Rigel everything’s purple that grows!” Aunt Louise laughed and they set their bundles down on the counter in front of the two men. Joanna looked expectantly at them while Louise bustled around behind them, making breakfast. 

 

“Well?”

 

“Well what?” Bones looked at her over the rim of his mug.

 

“Well, are you coming?” She directed this at Jim, who looked between her and Bones, wondering what he’d missed. Joanna signed and frowned at him, crossing her arms. “I _left_ you a note! I put it right under your door this morning.”

 

“Er,” Jim felt the back of his neck flush and he couldn’t help his involuntary glance at Bones, who looked as red as he felt. Luckily, he figured, Jo was too young yet to realize how plainly that look had just said, _I didn’t exactly sleep in my own room last night._ “Musta missed it, kiddo, sorry. What did it say?”

 

Her little shoulders slumped. “You’re supposed to come to summer camp with me today.”

 

“You want us to drive you?” Bones asked.

 

“No, _Daddy_ , not _you._ Uncle Jim! My teacher said he should come.”

 

“Oh.” Bones shut his mouth and looked at Jim. But apparently he was more immune to Joanna’s glare than Jim was, because he added, “Why?”

 

“Well, obviously, because I’m terrific,” Jim smirked at Bones, then asked Jo, “Are you bringing me for show and tell?”

 

Joanna shook her hair back over her shoulders, an uncanny imitation of her mother complete with the muttered, “Honestly!” under her breath. “I told Miss Beckah you were staying with my dad and knew everything about space, and since it’s space camp she said you could come and talk to us.”

 

“She told you to bring him…or you asked if you could bring him and pestered her until she said yes?” Bones asked, one eyebrow arched at his daughter.

 

“Miss Beckah likes me,” Joanna said primly. “I didn’t _have_ to pester her.”

 

Jim laughed out loud, and even Bones had to smile. “I’ll come, but I’m bringing your dad along. A hostage for your good behavior.” Joanna looked mystified and he winked at her. “Hostages are a very important part of space travel. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

 

=^=  

 

The Phoenix Exploration Center was just outside town, a complex of buildings and outdoor areas that played host to several thousand children every year, from all over the world. Joanna told Jim as they drove that she’d been going there every summer for camp since her daddy joined Starfleet. Mama wasn’t happy about it, she confided, but Jo never let that stop her. She wanted to know what her daddy’s job was like, and probably would end up going into space work as well, when she grew up. She said this casual as anything and didn’t notice the hard set of Bones’s jaw as she did. 

 

Jim had also heard her say she was dead set on going to Cerberus for school in a few years, as soon as she was old enough to take the entrance exams. He shook his head, wondering where the hell the onward-and-upward gene had come from in this kid, with her mother content to stay in Podunk, GA, and her dad who woulda been fine if his feet never left the ground. It was odd, yeah, but it was _cool._ She was cool. The best kid he’d ever met. Which he told Bones every time the doc looked to be at the end of his rope with her antics and sass. The fact that she’d asked for him to come to class with her made Jim’s chest feel too small for his heart as she led them through the hallway.

 

They were on a survey mission to the Badlands today, and the huge domed room housed a control deck that was a respectable facsimile of an Antares-type survey ship. The projections outside the view screen were not quite on par with, say, the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but were still damn good. Stepping onto the bridge and looking out the front screen, Jim felt the same tug around his middle that he felt every time he set foot on a ship. His palms itched and he clasped his hands behind his back, glancing at Bones. He had loved every nanosecond of this vacation from reality - after the first night, at least, once they’d gotten all the shit out of the way that had been festering between them for weeks - and until this moment he’d hardly have objected to staying here another year, or five, or the rest of his life. But the blip of monitors and clatter of feet, even miniature ones, on metal decking, the swish of airlocks and computerized countdowns swirled around him, and suddenly he ached for his ship. 

 

Bones, however, was entertaining different sentiments. “She used to go to horse riding camp,” he muttered, shaking his head. “She should be out in the fresh air, not hunched over a screen in the dark.”

 

Joanna had left them just inside the door and was now talking animatedly to a young woman in the uniform of a civilian science officer. The woman nodded and Jo pointed back at them. Beside him, Jim felt Bones straighten almost to attention as Jo led her over to them. 

 

“This is Miss Beckah, she’s our flight director.” Jo introduced them. “This is Captain Jim Kirk of the Enterprise. And this is my dad.”

 

“I have a rank too, you know,” Bones grumbled half-heartedly at his daughter.

 

“Oh, yeah. He’s a doctor,” Jo added. 

 

Miss Beckah reached out her hand to shake both of theirs, which Jim found surprisingly refreshing. It was nice to have a break from the whole attention-and-salute routine. 

 

“This is a, ah, nice place you have here,” Bones said.

 

“Thank you.” She smiled and looked around, giving a curt nod. Jim knew that look, that was the look he gave the Enterprise when he was introducing her to someone new. Beckah was fit to burst with pride for this place. “It was a hard decision to leave Starfleet Academy to come here, but we’ve really built it into something wonderful.”

 

Jim cocked his head, surprised. “You’re Starfleet?”

 

She shook her head. “I’m not enlisted, no. I was on the team of civilian contractors designing the holodeck training programs. I stayed on for five years, mainly tweaking the Kobayashi Maru.”

 

“Ohhh,” Jim was delighted. He folded his arms and stepped closer to her. He wondered if she’d heard of him. “You worked on the Kobayashi Maru?”

 

“And now she works with small children,” Bones pointed out.

 

She gave a flash of a grin, but said quite seriously, “Honestly this doesn’t feel a whole lot different.”

 

Jim crowed with laughter and Bones said, “So you must have worked with Spock, then.”

 

“I did,” she nodded, “for several years. He was my replacement.”

 

“He is pretty much a small child, isn’t he,” Jim said thoughtfully. 

 

Bones shook his head. “No. No parent would let their kid out of the house with a haircut like his.”

 

Beckah arched an eyebrow at them, uncannily reminiscent of the Vulcan they were discussing. “I happen to have a very high opinion of Mr. Spock.”

 

“As do I, Miss Beckah, my apologies. Teasing my first officer is a liberty I’m entitled to in exchange for putting up with him. The fact that I’m doing it behind his back just means I miss him. Which is not something I ever expected to say.” 

 

She looked skeptically between them, then gave a minute shake of her head. “Well, I’m so glad you could join us today. Our trainees have been clamoring to meet you since Joanna told us you were staying in town. I don’t have anything formal in mind, so I’m hoping you’ll be okay with walking around and observing the operation, talking to them about their tasks, answering questions?”

 

“I’d love to,” Jim nodded, giving her a broad smile. He glanced at Bones, who rolled his eyes, shrugged, and nodded.

 

“Wonderful!” Beckah beamed at them, then lifted her comm and turned the dial to broadcast. Her voice was amplified around the room as though on a shipwide transmission. “Trainees, your attention please. We have a surprise inspection, today. I’d like to introduce you to the two Starfleet officers who are here to monitor our mission progress and observe each of you in action. This is Captain Kirk and Doctor McCoy of the USS Enterprise. Please continue in your assigned tasks, and answer any questions they ask you. And feel free to ask them your own questions. Back to work!”

 

The kids, who had been staring at them with rapt attention, reluctantly turned back to their workscreens. Some kept sneaking glances over their shoulders. Joanna grinned and bounced on the balls of her feet, then dashed off to her station. Beckah led them around the outside of the deck, pointing out the features of the program. When they were out of earshot of any of the kids, she turned to them and lowered her voice. “I should tell you, we do have several students who were affected by the recent tragedy. No one lost any immediate family members, but there were a few aunts and uncles, cousins, family friends, etcetera. We’ve spent some time talking about it, helping the kids process the idea of danger and loss and duty. But it might come up when you’re talking to them. They might have questions for you.” 

 

Jim kept his face neutral as he nodded, but when she turned away he felt Bones grip his elbow. He must have looked too shell-shocked to warrant any gloating because Bones only squeezed him and muttered in his ear, “Not quite what you thought you were signing up for, huh.”

 

“What are they going to ask me,” fighting down panic with anger at being tricked into this, “‘Why did you let my uncle die, Mr. Jim?’ Jesus.”

 

“These are our navigators today,” Beckah was saying, recalling their attention and introducing them to three kids by names that slipped in one ear and straight out the other. 

 

They pulled their shoulders back and tried to appear taller than they were. Drawing a blank, Jim stood stiffly before them. Bones came to his rescue by asking, “So, do you like navigating?”

 

Two of them nodded vigorously but the third shook her head. “No, I want to be the pilot. Navigating is boring.”

 

Thinking of the many (mostly) good-natured arguments he’d overheard between Sulu and Chekov, Jim had to smile. “And what kind of ships do you want to fly?”

 

“All kinds,” she said. Then amended, “fast ones, mostly.”

 

When none of them seemed likely to start questioning him about dead uncles, Jim loosened up. He and Bones began wandering separately over the deck, stopping when this kid or that caught their eye. Jim spent almost twenty minutes sitting beside the kid at the communications station discussing the ethics of the mining craze that was sweeping the Alpha quadrant. When Jim finally stood up to let him get back to work, he looked around to see Bones, leaning against a console and surrounded by a small crowd, some standing and some sitting, all listening wide eyes. Beckah was a few paces away, her arms folded around her PADD, looking similarly absorbed and not seeming to mind at all that her trainees had blatantly abandoned their posts.

 

“There’s so much more to it than that,” Bones was saying. “Yes, sometimes there is fighting and battles, but that’s not why we’re out there on the _Enterprise._ We’re scientists; we’re explorers. Just like what you’re doing here, we go out there into deep space and we map what we find, we meet new people, and we are the face of the Federation. We have to be the best that we can be, every day, to show the rest of the galaxy, including all those people who think that fighting and killing and oppression is the only way, that there is a better way to live. Jim,” Bones had noticed Jim watching him and nodded to him. Heads swiveled to look at him, then back to Bones, “Captain Kirk, that is, is in charge of leading us into the unknown. Exploring strange new worlds.” He was still watching Jim and he said this with a wry twist of his lips. Jim winked at him. “And I’m there to make sure that if someone gets sick, or hurt, they get well again.”

 

“Mr. McCoy?” a soft voice sounded by Bones’s elbow. 

 

A boy no older than Joanna stood looking up at him, and he crouched down to be on eye level with him. “Yes?”

 

“My name is Michael Hannity.”

 

“Oh.” Bones said. Jim, hearing the name, looked quickly at Bones and saw the color drain from his face.

 

The boy nodded. “My dad said you were the one who tried to save my auntie.”

 

The chatter and chirp of children and controls continued to swirl around them, but Bones seemed shut away from it all in a tiny bubble of this boy’s grief, and Jim was riveted. 

 

“I did.” Bones reached out, laying his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I knew your aunt for four years. She was a good, brave person and I did everything I could to save her.”

 

Michael nodded solemnly. “My dad cries a lot about her. He never wanted her to go on a fighting ship. Everyone else in my family is a scientist.”

 

Jim felt as though his heart was being dragged from his chest. Hannity _had_ been a scientist. 

 

Joanna was staring at her father, looking concerned. Jim knew he was probably wearing a similar expression of distress, and schooled his face to an unconcerned blank. Bones was still one on knee in front of the boy, and squeezed his shoulder. “Life takes all of us down different paths, sometimes even down different paths than we meant to go on. Your auntie _was_ a scientist, Michael, and even though everything went horribly wrong at the end, she was right where she wanted to be - on the best ship in the universe, exploring and discovering new things every day. I know you miss her, and your dad misses her. Everyone who knew her misses her and wishes she had been somewhere, anywhere else, that day the attack happened. It might not help right now, but you should know that she was very happy, right up until that day.”

 

Michael nodded again, and turned around, going back to his workstation. The mood over the crowd of children was subdued, and Joanna slipped in next to her father and took his hand. Surprised, Bones looked down at her. She leaned against him, looking up, unblinking. 

 

“Who will try to save you if you get hurt, Daddy?”

 

Bones looked as though he’d like the floor to open and swallow him. The easy assurance he’d had with the other kids dissolved as he tried to answer his own daughter’s impossible question. _Why can’t you promise me you’ll live forever, Daddy?_

 

Jim sidled up to them. Joanna, seeing him, dropped her dad’s hand and looked away, as though she didn’t want anyone else to see that she was ever worried or scared. Bones ignored him, dropping to one knee in front of his daughter, pulling her gently around to look at him. “Hey. Sweet Pea. Look at me.”

 

“Daddy,” she wriggled out of his grasp, looking around, clearly mortified. “Stop it.”

 

“No, Sweet Pea, listen to me.” He held tight to her hand and waited until she stood still, though she focused on her shoes instead of his face. Bones, his voice strained, continued haltingly, “I can’t promise that nothing will ever happen to me. But I can promise that there will always be someone, a doctor just as good as me, there to look out for me and take care of me, if I need it.”

 

She lifted angry eyes to his face. “But you’re the best, and you couldn’t save Michael’s auntie.”

 

Bones swallowed. “Sometimes, baby…Sometimes a person gets so sick, or so hurt, that it’s just their time to go. And bad things like those attacks might happen again. There will always be bad people in the galaxy who don’t think about hurting other people to get what they want. But I will do everything I can to keep from getting hurt. And so will Uncle Jim. He’s gonna keep us all as safe as he can. Right?” 

 

Bones looked up at him, and Jim gave Jo his best reassuring nod. He had spoken to every single one of his dead crewmember’s families, including Michael’s father, and not once had their grief hit him quite like this.

 

“Okay, whatever,” Jo said, twisting in his grip again. Bones let her slip away from him and stood, his face white and pinched.

 

Miss Beckah called to her trainees that it was time for lunch, and they all flowed out of the room. She shook hands with Jim and Bones once more, thanked them for coming, and they left.

 

=^= 

 

Sliding into their rented groundcar, they sat in silence.

 

 _I thought we were explorers,_ Scotty had said. 

 

 _We have to be the best that we can be, every day, to show the rest of the galaxy, including all those people who think that fighting and killing and oppression is the only way, how there is a better way to live,_ Bones had said.

 

But that wasn’t who Jim was. He’d come face to face with the horrible truth somewhere in the midst of all the death and destruction he had caused. He was nothing but a fighter. A brawler. A breaker of lives, a destroyer of families. Pike had tried to tell him that, as he was dressing him down and stripping him of command. 

 

_You think the rules don't apply to you. There's greatness in you, but there's not an ounce of humility. You think that you can't make mistakes, but there's going to come a moment when you realize you're wrong about that, and you're going to get yourself and everyone under your command killed._

 

What had he, James T. Kirk, ever done that was worth half of what Uhura had done to get where she was. Or Spock, Scotty, Sulu, hell even Bones. The difference was in the striving, a thought that Jim had only ever scoffed at before. The rest of them had worked their asses off, studying and striving to climb as high as they had. He had succeeded because he knew he would and never allowed himself to question the fact of his own greatness. And he had a way of bringing other peoples’ opinions around to fall in line with his own. Where had that gotten them? Dead, mostly. Even he himself had died for it. And if he had stayed dead, it would have been exactly what he deserved. His talent was for being in the right place at the right time. And the time that place was the irradiated warp core had been no different. 

 

“Shit,” Bones grumbled, and slowly Jim came back to himself and the awareness that they’d been sitting in the car, unmoving and unspeaking, for he didn’t know how long. Bones was scrubbing a hand over his face, still looking pale. “What was I supposed to say to that?”

 

Jim could hardly remember what had happened, had to struggle to kick his brain back into the present and figure out what Bones was moaning about. He shook his head and shrugged helplessly. “I dunno, Bones. It sounded good to me.”

 

Bones snorted and started up the car, peeling out of the parking lot faster than was probably safe.

 

“Did you know she worried about you like that?” Jim asked.

 

Bones said, “No. She’s never said a word about it. Neither has Joss.”

 

Jim let out an angry breath. “She’s probably hoping you kick it so she doesn’t have to share Jo with you anymore.”

 

They came jolting to a halt ten feet shy of an intersection and Bones twisted to jab his finger in Jim’s chest. “Don’t you ever fucking say that again, you hear me?”

 

Spoiling for a fight, Jim leaned in closer to get in Bones’s face, snarling, “What do you want me to say, then? Find a way to magically un-enlist? Go AWOL? Maybe spend some time fucking _talking_ to your own kid so it isn’t a shock when you find out she actually gives a shit about you?”

 

Bones opened his mouth, looking ready to bite Jim’s goddamn head off, but then his face went slack and he slumped back in his seat. “You’re right.”

 

Jim recoiled. Bones giving in to him was somewhere on the list of his top five least favorite things in the universe. 

 

Bones passed his hand over his face, hiding his eyes. “I should. I should quit. Take the penalties and damn the consequences and get out. While I can.”

 

“Bones,” Jim choked out, panic digging its sudden claws into his throat. “No way, man. Run away? Come on. Is this about the five year mission? If it is, I’ll talk to Komack, I’ll rescind my bid. There’s plenty of places the _Enterprise_ is needed closer to home.”

 

Shock turned Bones’s face into a comical mask, his eyebrows shooting up and almost disappearing into his untidy hairline. He needed a haircut, Jim realized. His hair was far from its military precision. His outfit, too. Though he’d tucked in his shirt for the occasion of visiting Joanna’s class, he would hardly be recognized as the most fastidious CMO in the fleet. He looked comfortable. At home. Well. Not _now_ , maybe, when he was staring at Jim with his eyes open wide and his mouth shut tight. 

 

They were still stalled out in the middle of the road. Jim leaned across the console between them, buried his hands in the overlong hair at the nape of Bones’s neck, and pulled him roughly close, kissing him hard. 

 

A car behind them blared its horn and they startled, falling apart. Bones let down his window to give the driver behind them the finger, then sped off towards home. Louise’s house, that was. 

 

Jim was shaking and clenched his hands together in his lap. “Okay,” he said, hating himself. “That was an overreaction.”

 

Bones didn’t look at him, just gave a snorting kind of laugh, not at all amused. Silence stretched between them like the thinnest pane of glass. Bones shattered it with a handful of words.

 

“Jim, sometimes I wish…”

 

There were about a million and one ways that sentence could end, and Jim was on fire for every one of them. He wondered if _Wish you’d stayed dead_ was anywhere among them.

 

“This is gonna sound…Jesus.” Bones was running his hands through his hair, the picture of distress. “This is gonna sound crazy. And stupid. But I gotta…” 

 

Jim reached over and gripped his knee. Bones brought them coasting to a stop beside an empty park. The trees around them shivered in the afternoon breeze, the sun making everything glow. 

 

Bones looked down at the hand on his knee like it had sprouted there suddenly and without warning. Haltingly, he continued, “There’s times I wish we could disappear. Run away, just you and me. And sometimes…I just wanna stay here, forget everything that’s happened. You know how you felt about Pike? Well I’ll tell you what kills me. It’s the thought of Joanna, growing up without me, and one day looking for what I shoulda been to her in another man who can never really be her father. I know that, statistically, there’s as much chance of me choking on a peach pit and dying right here as there is of me dying in space in the line of duty. But there it is.”

 

Jim would have given a lot to have him end that thought at _Just you and me._  

 

He suppressed a shudder and looked away. Pike’s name had hardly passed between them since the night they arrived in Georgia, when Bones had voiced the question that everyone else just assumed they knew the answer to, and asked Jim if he’d been sleeping with Pike. The truth, more painful than Jim had ever expected it to be, came out then and he’d ended up weeping for Pike, mourning the loss of the best, the only, father he had ever known. 

 

Bones looked over at him. “And another thing. Since when did you get so used to having me around that the thought of my leavin’ sends you into a panic, hm?”

 

Jim was ripped from his reflections, and he glared at him, protesting, “I don’t _panic_.”

 

Bones’s lips twitched. “That sounded a lot like panic, a minute ago.”

 

Jim bristled, on the defense and hating it. “Well, maybe you’re right. I could make a case for you and try and work it out so the penalties aren’t too harsh. Maybe you should get out, if that’s what you want. You talked about it the whole time we were in Academy.”

 

“You’d be dead five times over if I’d run out when I wanted to.”

 

“Once woulda been enough.”

 

Bones stared at him, horrified, as comprehension dawned. “You sonuva…You wish I’d let you die.”

 

“It’s what Spock would have done,” Jim threw the bitter words in his face. Bones looked as though Jim had slapped him.

 

Bones had left his window open when he flipped off the impatient driver behind him, and through it now they could hear the wind in the tree branches above them and the songs of the carefree birds hidden in their leaves. The breeze did not seem to want to venture into the car, not daring to disturb the heavy air between them. 

 

“This is…” Bones ground out, “ _You_ are beyond fucked up.”

 

“Can’t argue with that,” Jim said, looking away. 

 

Bones got out of the car, walking aimlessly into the park, bracing his hands on the top of his head and looking heavenward. Jim watched him, fingers against his lips. Watched the muscles in his back and shoulders, the way his fingers laced together seamlessly. Watched as, after a few minutes, Bones turned back and looked at him, dropping his hands from his head to shrug expressively, arms held away from his sides. _Your move, kid._

 

Jim sighed and slid out of the car, walking slowly towards Bones. By the time he reached him, Bones was facing away again, watching the progress of a pair of squirrels chasing each other up and down and around the trees on the edge of the park. 

 

Jim propped his chin on Bones’s shoulder, circling one arm around his waist and holding on loosely, chest against his back. “You wouldn’t like me as much as you do if I weren’t so fucked up,” he said. A peace offering. A throwback to the old days at the Academy when how much Jim was pissing him off this week was the biggest worry in Bones’s life.

 

Bones turned his head, his nose scraping along the slight stubble over Jim’s jaw. “Do you ever think about the timeline old Spock came from? I don’t think the McCoy he knew did like you very much.”

 

Jim laughed quietly. The implications of the alternate timeline thrilled and terrified him, and Bones knew it, but he said only, “his loss.”

 

Jim waited for Bones to demand which of their counterparts Jim meant, but he didn’t. He’d never spoken to Jim about his suspicions regarding the nature of Spock and Jim’s relationship in that other reality, but Jim knew he had them. Everyone did, it seemed. Jim honestly wasn’t sure what his friends and crewmembers _did_ when they weren’t speculating about his love life in this and every reality.

 

Jim sighed, his breath ruffling the hair by Bones’s cheek. “So what’s it gonna be, doctor?”

 

Bones shook his head, eyes falling half-closed. “I don’t know.”

 

“We’re due back home inside of a week.”

 

“I know. I heard from Scotty yesterday. He says things are taking shape with the _Enterprise_ repairs, but it'll be a long while yet before your girl is up and running. But he swears she'll be as good as new.”

 

“And purring like an Aldebaran kitten, I know. He called me too. But there's gonna be lots to do before then.”

 

“I love the _Enterprise_ , Jim.”

 

And that was the last thing Jim had expected to hear out of his mouth. He blinked and pulled away to look at him better. “Excuse me?”

 

Bones ducked his head, digging at a root with the toe of his boot. “You heard me. I love being on the _Enterprise._ I could take or leave the bein’ in space bit, but I love being ship’s doctor.”

 

“And you’ve even gotten used to taking orders from me?”

 

Bones snorted. “You can go on thinking I listen to you as long as it keeps peace between us.”

 

Jim lifted his lips in a weak smile. So long as he was Bones’s superior officer, peace was all there _could_ be between them. If anyone who was in charge of anything could see them together right now, they’d be assigned to opposite ends of the galaxy before Bones could think of a good simile for _quick as._ It’d been well over a year since Jim had fallen asleep with Bones’s sweat cooling on his skin, and now that he’d had a taste of it again, knowing that in a week they’d be back to the hands-off status quo made his stomach churn.

 

“Hey,” Bones called across what seemed a vast distance, calling him back to himself. He gathered a fistful of Jim’s shirt and pulled him closer, until their noses almost brushed. “I gotta figure out how to talk to my daughter about what’s worryin’ her, but I’m comin’ back to the sky with you, Jim.”

 

“Thank god,” Jim breathed, hands finding Bones’s hips, fingers digging in hard.

 

Bones lifted his chin, moving his lips out of Jim’s reach. “Are we gonna hafta figure this thing out?” He tugged on Jim’s shirt to make his point. Their hips were pressed tight together and Jim didn’t have to ask which thing he meant.

 

“We’ll manage, right?” Jim gave his best disarming grin. “You and me and the stars, just like always.”

 

Bones was not disarmed, but he gave a quiet hum in the back of his throat and let go of Jim, backing off a half step. “What should we do today?”

 

Jim felt his heart sink into his stomach. On cue, his stomach growled. “I’m hungry.”

 

“You’re always hungry.” Bones started walking back towards the car.

 

Catching up with him, trying to play fair, Jim offered, “I could take myself outta the way, if you want. You can talk to Louise about talking to Jo, I bet she'll know what to say. I’ll head back to San Francisco and let you have the rest of the week with your family.” 

 

Bones put his hand out to stop Jim opening the car door. Jim looked up quickly, in time to catch the look in Bones’s eyes. He looked as hungry as Jim felt as he dragged Jim to him, crashing their mouths together with unrestrained desire that Bones hadn’t let Jim see on him in years, even in bed. Breathing hard, Bones broke the kiss, pressing his forehead almost painfully again Jim’s. Jim curled his hand around the back of Bones’s neck and held on. 

 

“Stay ’til tonight,” Bones murmured. “Stay for dinner. Jo’ll never forgive you if you leave without a goodbye. She’ll miss you.”

 

Throat tight, Jim nodded. “Okay.”

 

Bones blinked and looked at Jim. Ran his knuckles along his jaw. Muttered, “Goddamn.”

 

Jim bit the inside of his cheek, and slid back into the car.

**Author's Note:**

> I went to Georgia for the first time last weekend, and somewhere between the pleasure of being there and the random "Oh you should write this/oh what about that/ooh I really want to see all the things!" texts exchanged with ImpishTubist, an idea was sparked that spun out of control and became this massive texty thing. And so it is with humble respect that I dedicate this, my first Trek fic in about three years, to you, my dear friend. Live Long & Prosper.


End file.
